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Brain Surgery Pt.4
By Wolf Paulus <wolf@wolfpaulus.com>

Posted Tuesday, February 28th, 2006

The first three parts of the brain surgery series dealt with memory upgrades. This time however, the aging G5 is getting an additional hard drive, the Seagate Barracuda 250 GB SATA drive: ST3250823AS.
  1. G5's memory upgrade
  2. iBook 1.2GHz memory upgrade
  3. 1.67 GHz 15" PowerBook 1GB DDR-2 memory upgrade
Picking the right drive is not really that easy and most SATA drives you find at Fry's or your local PC Club probably won't work in a PowerMac G5. Fortunately, there are sites like Accelerate Your Mac, with a helpful Drive Compatibility Database.

I was looking for an inexpensive 250GB hard drive that I wanted to use as a secondary drive in the PowerMac G5 (late 2003 model, single processor 1.8 GHz) and ended up buying the ST3250823AS Seagate Barracuda at NewEgg. NewEgg is located in Whittier, CA, which means I had to pay sales tax but even with the cheapest shipping options, the drive arrived the next day.


Installing the drive

Apple has detailed instructions on how to replace a G5's hard drive posted on their site. However, the instruction are all about replacing a drive and therefore they forgot to mention that four additional guide screws are stored inside the G5 (4 black head screws on the very left - photo below).



Connecting the readily available power cable and the data cable to the drive is straight forward and after rotate the drive locking tab, the G5 gets closed a reconnected to the peripherals again.



In case you were wondering, Serial ATA drives are designed for easy installation with no jumpers, terminators, or other settings. It is not necessary to set any jumpers on this drive for proper operation. The jumper block adjacent to the signal connector is for factory use only.

1st. startup with the new drive

Booting up with the new drive was not any different at first but after the login, this message dialog came up:



Without clicking any of the buttons however, it disappeared after about 5 seconds and taking a look at the System Profiler revealed the two drives.



Just to be sure that the drives works well, I'll probably run Julian Mayer's SMARTReporter for the next couple of days.

S.M.A.R.T.

S.M.A.R.T. provides near-term failure prediction for disc drives. When S.M.A.R.T. is enabled, the drive monitors predetermined drive attributes that are susceptible to degradation over time. However, my drive shipped with S.M.A.R.T. features disabled.
And only after erasing the drive with DiskUtility and rebooting, would OS X show the with S.M.A.R.T. status verified.



Disclosure: This blog is written and edited by me, it contains my words and my opinions only, and does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest.
I am not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. This blog does not accept any form of cash advertising, sponsorship, or paid topic insertions. However, I will and do accept and keep free products, services, and other forms of compensation from companies and organizations. All advertising is in the form of advertisements generated by a third party ad network and identified as such.
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Published on: Tuesday, February 28th, 2006  •  Category: [hardware]
Article URL : http://wolfpaulus.com/journal/hardware/brainsurgery4.html